When a tribute gift is received, often you receive a variety of information, with each gift, that needs to be added to the constituent's account.  Aside from entering the gift, does anyone have a procedure or seamless process that has worked in capturing the additional information, at the time of gift batching and while it is in your hands?  We are a samll shop with limited staff.  Thank you in advance for sharing your experience or 'tricks of the trade'.

Do you want to enter information about the donor or the honor/memorial person?

Lindy Steen

HPH Hospice

Lindy.Steen@hphospice.net

Donor mostly, alot of pieced information is received when the donor (s) have included an attached note with the gift.

 Zoe

Zoe,

 Is this information coming in via hand written notes, online, spreadsheets? If this information is somewhere that you can import, our company has developed an application called Import-O-Matic that imports constituent and gift information simultaneously, all while doing on-the-fly duplicate searches and address updates, setting default fields, etc. You can see a video demonstration of the solution here:
http://www.palmettotech.com/import/

It helps eliminate the manual process involved.  My contact details are below if you have further interest in speaking regarding this.

 Pam Brueck

843-564-5387

PalmettoTech.com

pam.brueck@palmettotech.com

I appreciate your response but I am looking for a procedural process for handling this information on the fly, not a sales pitch. We would not be interested at this time.  Thank you

 Zoe

 We do three things to capture data regarding tributes:

1) When we are entering the gift in the batch we select the "Tribute" button (looks like a scroll), select Add New and then locate the person who is being honored.  This allows us to easily track tributes from both the donor and the honoree side as it is our procedure to send out letters to the tributee or their family and to list all tributes in our Annual Report.  It is easy to run pre-existing Tribute Reports when you track it like this. Also, it provides a place to enter additional information which you want to capture but you're not sure where. 

2) Another way that we track memorial/tribute gifts is to set up a memorial/tribute on the honoree's record when a fund is set up for that purpose.  From the constituent record you can go to the Honor/Memorial tab and select "Constituent is an honor/memorial" then "Add New" and you can set defaults such as fund data or list other data such as why this honor/memorial has been established (i.e. retirement, etc...).  When the defaults are set it helps filling out the fund information on the batch entry. 

3) When a tribute fund is established we set a relationship between the honoree and the fund that is set at "Tribute/Memorial".  This allows me to easily pull all of the tribute funds to ensure every gift to those funds has been assigned as a tribute before running the Tribute Reports.

I know this may sound like overkill but it doesn't take much time to follow these steps and when tracking data from three different angles it helps ensure data integrity.

It is difficult to answer the question since I am unclear on the type of info you are tracking, but if you mean such info as, for instance, a special note to put on letter to the family, such as "From Robert and family - we are so happy for you!", you can store it in a gift note or a text attribute, depending on how you pull the information into the letter (through RE:Mail or RE:Export)

I agree with your process, it also works for me.  What I'm looking for is, when you receive a tremendous pouring of gifts and alot of information beyond what is in an obit, how or when do you handle this?  Do you go back aftering completing the gift process and capture this information? 

Zoe

Zoe,

Send me an email directly at khartt@mainecf.org and I'll attach the procedures.

Karen

Zoe-

We are a "small shop", too - only 2 of us that would know where to begin and how to tackle the question you pose!

I have found it very helpful, in addition to setting up the actual tribute report, to track key donations to the tribute via the relationship tab. This is helpful for gifts that may come in following years, especially those from family or a close friend.

I also use the notes tab to track key pieces of information. For example, because I am at a Humane Society, gifts often will reference specific ties to the shelter - i.e. adopted a pet in 1999, volunteered 20 years ago, pet names, etc.

For all other pieces of information that are good to have access to, but do not need to be tracked as frequently - I scan the document using a desktop scanner and file under the media tab.

The major benefit is that when repeat tributes come in - they can be much more personalized. I have regular donors who give on the anniversary of a pet's adoption or on their birthday. Consequently - they receieve a nice personalized card for their pet! I also have memorial tributes for avid pet lovers and lifelong humane society supporters so I include reference to surviving pets in follow up correspondance to their families. This can be of great comfort to the families. To me, that is at the heart of our mission and I am so glad to be able to have access to this type of information and utilize it in this manner.

Hope this information is helpful.

After reading your post, here's another suggestion that might help if you are not already doing this. When you start your batch, go to "view" and select constituent window. This will bring the donors record up on the right side of your batch.  Then go to "constituent" "define constiuent fields". You can set up what fields you want to see on the record.  When in your batch you can fill in the fields for the constituent info or you can right click and go directly to the donors record to record additional information that you have in your hand.

Hope this helps

Lindy Steen

HPH Hospice

Lindy.Steen@hphospice.net